Description

After defeating the Drajian army, four former gladiator slaves journey to the recently liberated city of Tyr, whose evil sorcerer-king Kalak was recently slain. Although freed from Kalak's tyranny, Tyr is now defenseless against the ambition of the Dragon, a creature that came into existence as a transformation of a malevolent mage. The Dragon sends his powerful undead general the Lord Warrior to Tyr to conquer it and prepare for his coming. The heroes hook up with a rebel underground known as the Veiled Alliance and must oppose the Draxans and the Lord Warrior, while they are being secretly observed by the Dragon through his crystal ball. The party soon learns that the Dragon may be the least of their worries, however, as it becomes apparent that the Lord Warrior has his own hidden agenda and intends to unleash a long dormant monster of immense destructive power upon the world.

Dark Sun: Wake of the Ravager is a direct sequel to Shattered Lands. It has the same engine and basic gameplay as the original game, with slight graphical improvements (such as larger character sprites). Like its predecessor, this game is a departure from the earlier Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons games: instead of a first-person "maze game" focusing on dungeon crawling, the game has a third-person top-down view with more of a focus on interacting with the characters and environment. Battles are turn-based and take place in the same environment as exploration, with player-controlled and enemy parties being navigated in a tactical fashion. Character creation and party management are identical to those of the first game.

Since the sequel continues the story of the first game directly, player-controlled characters start at higher levels or can be imported from the previous game. As a result, the level cap is higher and characters are able to learn more powerful spells as mages, clerics, and masters of psionic disciplines. Compared to the predecessor, the second game has a more focused and linear plot: certain areas become open for exploration only after specific events have been triggered. However, there are still several optional areas with various sub-quests in them. Also, the game has a more distinct urban environment, with the city of Tyr serving as its central hub where most of the major quests originate.

Forums

Trivia

Character transfer

Because you can transfer characters from the previous game into this game, it can create a balance problem at the beginning of the game where your characters are somewhat stronger than they should be. (Although they're not all that stronger, the maximum level you could reach in Shattered Lands was lvl 9, and starting characters in this game begin at lvl 6-7).

The designers addressed this by giving monsters twice as many hit points if you use transferred characters. This is fine at the start of the game, but gets unfair by the time you reach the final boss.

Cover art

The striking cover (and title screen) artwork is a piece by Brom originally used as the cover to the 1992 Slave Tribes Dark Sun supplement book, TSR product #2404.

Plot stopper

There's a particularly nasty game-killing bug that prevents you from finishing the game about halfway through. It seems to crop up most frequently on the masterpiece jewel case edition.

In the mines, when you try to use the elevator, the game will freeze on the level loading screen. This occurs even if you load from an earlier save game and try it again. Since you need to use the elevator to get further into the game, this essentially halts your progress.

You can actually get around this by kicking out all of your party members except one, using the elevator with that one character, then re-hiring all your party members once you reach the bottom of the mine shaft.